Being Sober in Las Vegas is Weird, but The Griswold Western Excursion Was a Success

We even took the damned dam tour

Channeling Clark W. Griwold, last week my wife and I took our family on a tour of the western US. It was the tale of two trips. The first half would be a scenic jaunt through the vast and open desert of the southwestern United States. The second half would be to head to Las Vegas—the so-called “oasis” in that desert. In the scope of one vacation, I can’t imagine a greater contrast than the serenity of the absence of civilization and the presence of all that is loud and consumerist, but there we were doing both in just over a week.

For the first part of the trip, we flew from Pittsburgh to Denver, where we spent the night before heading to the Great Sand Dunes in southern Colorado. The dunes provided all the worst parts of the beach with the worst parts of mountains, providing us with ample opportunity to climb mountains AND get sand in places it ought not be. We rented sleds to slide down the dunes, which combined the thrill of sled-riding with the joy of being sandblasted.

It was about as fun as climbing up a snowy hill with a sled without the delight of being refreshed on the way down. Climbing a sandy mountain is as fun as a snowy one, except it’s hot.

Despite my snark, it was absolutely beautiful, and a lot of fun. We all enjoyed the pool and hot tub at the hotel in a nearby town. Weirdly, the hotel was in a depressed area in the middle of nowhere, Colorado. The town reminded me of a ghost town. Dilapidated factories, no apparent industry except the hollowed-out shell of a former industrial town. I couldn’t help but wonder what people do in places like this. What kind of life do they live? Do they have dreams, or are their dreams squelched by generations of sameness?

I found myself out walking the neighborhood in the middle of the night, having trouble sleeping in the same room as the rest of my family. A small, fenced-in playground across the street felt creepy at 4 am, despite the promise of sunshine and rainbows to the innocent children who would attend school there in a few hours. I walked to the skatepark across the street and wondered if kids still skateboard.

The next day, we drove to Page, Arizona. We looked forward to hiking some of the great southwestern landscape, so we stopped at the Four Corners, tooled around Horseshoe Bend and the Glen Canyon dam, and I worried a lot about the kids falling off a cliff. It was truly precarious looking over the edge of some of those rocky overhangs with nothing preventing the certain death of a thousand-foot fall. I consider myself pretty sure-footed, but kids are clumsy so I kept them pretty close. No second chances here. Nature is beautiful but unforgiving. We took pictures, enjoyed the amazing views, and explored together.

The kids got tired of me pointing out and subsequently taking pictures of rocks, as magnificent as they may have been. This must be one of those things only old people can appreciate, because after a day or so they stopped looking.

On our last day in Page, we had donuts at a tiny little mom-and-pop donut shop. If you’re ever in Page, AZ, please go visit Mark at Hot N Sweet Coffee and Donut Shop. The owners have so much charisma that they keep their customers coming back for more. Then, for dinner, we ate at a small place overlooking the gorgeous landscape a couple of miles downstream of the dam. The kids chased each other around the grassy event area while we sipped iced tea on the sunny patio. It was as nice a moment as I can remember with all four of us there with no other cares in the world.

We also took a tour of nearby Antelope Canyon and saw some of the most beautiful views of the trip. Walking through there was like peering into deep time, with layers and layers of time stacked upon one another. We even saw a cagey Great Horned Owl taking a nap high up on the canyon wall.

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The next day, we headed for Las Vegas, where we would be assaulted with the exact opposite atmosphere. We could feel the tension building as we got closer. Instead of leisure and open spaces, we were immediately greeted with traffic, noise, and the confusion of not knowing where the fuck to go to return our rental vehicle with 5 minutes left to spare, then dragging all our luggage a half-mile through the massive hotel/casino shopping center to the hotel lobby.

After getting checked in, we all changed to go to the pool area, complete with a great lazy river. Not a chaise was to be found except by the dumpster, the lazy river was teeming with a mass of bodies, and we didn’t realize we had less than an hour until they closed it. It was a 30-minute round trip to get my wallet, a $50 fee to BUY the innertubes, a 10-minute sibling disagreement over innertube color, and enough time to go less than one lap before they shut the whole operation down for the day.

The 3-hour time difference to home had gotten the better of us, too, and the kids were tapped out at 7 pm. After they crashed, I felt odd being in a place made for so-called nightlife, despite not taking part in that nightlife for several years now. But the body remembers. It remembers what you do in a place like this. You drink, you party, and you lust after sex and money.

It was a stark contrast to the Vegas trips of my 20s and 30s, where time didn’t matter and I stayed up drinking and gambling all night. Being stuck in the room made me a little resentful if I’m honest. I had never been to Las Vegas with my wife, with kids, and without alcohol, so I was reeling a bit. There are no refrigerators, coffee makers, or anything free in the rooms, forcing you to go downstairs and spend money. I enjoyed an iced coffee with instant coffee we had for the trip, feeling a bit of redemption. We were going to see The Sphere the next day, and that would be fun.

It was an adventure just getting to The Sphere by way of the monorail and a lot of walking, but it was worth it. The prices for everything in Las Vegas are high, so we weren’t surprised.

What did surprise me was the people.

Recently I’ve become acutely aware of our sick and twisted attachment to our phones, to the internet, to some bullshit version of connectivity. A woman in front of me watched nonstop fingernail painting videos on Instagram before the show, and then took almost constant video of the entire film.

Do you know what an 18k, 270°screen looks like when you take video of it on your phone? It looks like a sad bootleg copy recorded by some creep in a trench coat hiding in the back of the theater. I tried not to let it bother me, but I couldn’t stop seeing how pathetic it was. Even in this city of lust and greed and addiction, it seemed sad.

The film, Postcard From Earth is a striking look at humanity’s impact on the earth, and I couldn’t help but notice how our entire existence is consumed with consuming. Even while sitting in the middle of a mecca of consumer hedonism, people sit and stuff their fat fucking heads with more trash than ever before. We consume, consume, consume—resources, energy, media—like we can’t fill our fat faces enough. The energy drain that technology takes on the earth is staggering and increasing exponentially, yet we sit around asking ChatGPT to write our fucking worthless emails and create vapid, empty images.

This is how we live now. Digital purgatory. Everything is cold and mapped out and calculated. We consume exponentially more without providing anything in return. We are in constant need of validation in the form of empty hearts and likes that provide literally nothing of value, but we can’t help ourselves.

Even the slot machines are digital now. Gone are the rows of mechanical machines plopping out hundreds of quarters. One of the magical sounds of old casinos was the clinking of change being dropped into buckets. They’ve been replaced by pods of tall, curved screens where we “spin” a digital wheel that is programmed with some algorithm. Another unique feature lost to efficiency.

I digress. The Sphere was amazing to see, but there’s something sinister about our technology-driven lives, slaves to platforms and algorithms and spreadsheets. I looked over at my kids, who will be chained to technology from now on, and see they’re just enjoying the amazing experience of being here now. And because of them, I am, too.

The trip, in most every sense, was a complete success. We saw a little of everything, and all saw things we hadn’t seen before. Trips like this highlight how fast time with kids goes by. I worry that I didn’t appreciate the first several years of their lives because I was drinking, but I’m doing my best to be present for the time I have with them now.

Even in a place like Las Vegas, which is overstimulating in every sense, we found comfort in simply being together. Las Vegas was plenty of fun even with younger kids. We saw Blue Man Group, which they loved, and were entertained by the people attending Wrestlemania. I spent almost no time in the casino, even winning $100 early one morning, and no time at all at the bar. We went to bed early and rested, and after 3 days had seen enough of sin city.

We’re in a narrow window with these kids. With them now 9 and 12, we’re trying to do some fun things with them before they realize how lame we are. Now we can cross these places off the list. With so much to see, and as long as the world isn’t gone, we’re thinking Mexico or California for next year. Time will tell.